The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  A man lay spread-eagled on the ground, his wrists and ankles tethered and staked, his torso supporting four oaken planks fastened in parallel with iron bands. At the prisoner’s feet rose a mountain of granite blocks, each as large as an ox’s head, around which clustered a dozen curious Salemites and a handful of Court officials. Judge Stoughton rapped his knuckles on the topmost block, as if to prove it a true stone and not a loaf of bread or block of cheese. Judge Hathorne made ready to savor his sot-weed, clamping his churchwarden pipe in his jaw. Judge Sewall read his Bible. Judge Corwin recited his Pater Noster.

  Breaking from the knot of bystanders, a grinning Abigail scuttled toward Jennet and Dunstan. “How marvelous that you’ve come! I so feared you would miss the first stone!”

  “The prisoner’s Giles Corey,” Dunstan explained to Jennet. “For refusing to make his plea, innocent or nay, the stubborn old wizard’s to receive a dose of the peine forte et dure.”

  The sheriff approached the block mound, took hold of a particularly large stone and, as the blue veins bulged in his forehead and a grunt escaped his lips, set it atop the planks right above the prisoner’s chest.

  Mr. Corey released a sound halfway between a hog’s squeal and a horse’s whinny.

  “Why doth the sheriff burden him so?” Jennet asked.

  “They’re going to crush the wizard flat,” Dunstan replied. “Inch by inch, they’ll press him to death.”

  “Crush him?” Jennet rasped as sweat collected in her palms and bile filled her belly.

  “’Twill take him all morning to die,” Abigail said. “Mayhap the whole day.”

  The sheriff dropped a second granite block on the planks. Mr. Corey groaned.

  “Will you make your plea, sir?” inquired Judge Hathorne, puffing on his pipe.

  “Another…stone,” Mr. Corey gurgled.

  “I shan’t watch this!” Jennet screamed. “’Tis obscene!”

  “’Tis justice!” Dunstan retorted.

  “Obscene as the torture of our aunt!”

  “This Corey drinks the blood of newborn babes!” Abigail insisted as a third stone thudded against the planks. The prisoner hissed like an enraged viper, saliva bubbling through his teeth. “Last night his spectral form pursued me round the barn with a butcher’s cleaver!”

  Before the sheriff could apply the fourth stone, Jennet turned and sprinted away, running down Dock Street as if in flight from a Nimacook warrior or a ravenous she-wolf. She reached the Walcott house and climbed the ladder to the sleeping loft, determined to lose herself in the benign inscrutability of Isaac Newton and the quintessential sanity of Isobel Mowbray. She lit a candle, then removed from beneath her bed both the Principia Mathematica and the Woman’s Garden. Opening Professor Newton randomly, she beheld Theorem XLVI. “If there be several bodies consisting of equal particles whose forces are as the distance of the places from each,” ran her translation, “the force compounded of all the forces by which any corpuscle is attracted will tend to the common center of gravity of the attracting bodies.” To her whirling brain it seemed that the proposition described precisely the relationship betwixt Mr. Corey and the granite blocks.

  That night, as she lay abed with Chapter One of her Women’s Garden, “Ever Since Eve,” Dunstan appeared unbidden at her side and subjected her to a recapitulation of the peine forte et dure. “Hathorne kept saying ‘Plead!’ and Corey kept gasping ‘More weight!’ Is that not an amazing exchange? ‘Plead!’ ‘More weight!’ ‘Plead!’ ‘More weight!’ When Corey’s tongue came snaking from his mouth, the sheriff shoved it back with his cane!”

  More weight. What did the poor wretch mean? She speculated that his command was a cry of defiance. You scoundrels can ne’er defeat me. More weight. There was heroism in the late Mr. Corey, almost as much as in Aunt Isobel. But then a second, entirely horrible theory presented itself. Murder me faster, please. More weight. End my agony. More weight.

  Whilst Dunstan slipped away, she blew out the candle and watched the moonlight catch the thread of rising smoke. Pulling up the coverlet, she hugged the Principia to her breast. “I must have faith,” she whispered. Somewhere within these sacred pages lay the formula that would keep other innocents from suffering Giles Corey’s fate. Somewhere amongst these

  propositions, hidden behind the scholia, secluded betwixt the lemmas,

  lurked a method by which the world might learn to sift God’s

  laws from gossamer fancies and separate

  eternal truths from

  mere

  j

  Opinions,

  I grant you, are quite

  the cheapest coin of the intellectual

  realm, and normally I claim no special privileges

  for mine. In the case of the Salem Witch Trials, however, I feel

  that my subjective views occupy an echelon above mere crankiness and beyond rote contrariness—an echelon, in other words, that might be called insight. I have an opinion, for example, concerning the affectation by which the events of 1692 are routinely termed “the great witchcraft hysteria,” as if the whole affair were but a passing aberration. Yes, Abigail Williams and her band of bitches might be accurately labeled hysterics, but the people who took the girls’ shenanigans seriously were paragons of sobriety. The Salem tragedy could never have occurred were not an aggressively rational witch-hunting apparatus already in place throughout Western civilization. Hysteria, my foot.

  Then there’s the reflex by which the accusers are labeled “children.” The term is appropriate enough for Abigail Williams, Betty Parris, and Anne Putnam Jr., but Mary Warren, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott were all in late adolescence, and the adult accusers included Anne Putnam Sr., Goodwife Bibber, Goodwife Pope, and—before the machinery of suspicion turned against him—Giles Corey. Children, my ass.

  I must tell you about my recent return to the scene of Judge Stoughton’s crimes. It’s October. The air is brittle, cold as a witch’s tit. Through bookish will I’ve taken possession of Larry Hoffman, a real estate agent, lonely, befuddled. Courtesy of my host’s sensorium, I soon realize that a town called Danvers has arisen on the former site of Salem Village. It boasts a Domino’s Pizza, a Friendly’s, and several drugstores dispensing such decidedly non-Puritan products as latex condoms and the latest issue of Cuntoisseur.

  Bored with Danvers, I compel my proxy to venture south to Salem proper, so that I might see for myself how the witch-hunters’ descendants have accommodated their heritage. We arrive in the middle of a month-long celebration that styles itself “Salem Haunted Happenings at Halloween,” the invention of a bracingly shameless corporation called Atlantic Seaboard Enterprises. As the “Haunted Happenings” program book puts it, “The festivities offer something for everyone: parades, concerts, psychic fairs, costume balls, tours of Salem’s great historic sites, and restaurants galore.” Among the scheduled events are the Crowning of the King and Queen of Halloween (monarchs to be determined by acclamation), the Costumed Dog Contest (dress up your cocker spaniel and win a prize), Kid’s Day (pony rides, face painting, games, magicians), the Fright Train from Boston (six Pullman cars crammed with out-of-work actors playing zombies), and, most delightful of all, the Official Cat of Salem Contest, each entrant to be judged by appearance, personality, and an autobiographical essay (presumably written by the cat’s owner). Beyond this seasonal jollity, “Haunted Happenings” customers can avail themselves of the year-round attractions: the Salem Witch Museum, the Witch Dungeon Museum, Boris Karloff’s Witch Museum, the Salem Wax Museum of Witches and Seafarers, the Haunted Witch Village, Mayhem Manor, Terror on the Wharf, and, for the Nathaniel Hawthorne scholar in the family, the House of the Seven Gables. It’s obvious that in the recent past our Salemites confronted a difficult choice: should they continue feeling vaguely apologetic about an ancient miscarriage of justice, or should they seize the high ground and become the Halloween capital of the world? Eventually Atlantic Seaboard Enterprises entered the picture, til
ting local sentiment toward self-exoneration and tourism.

  Two days after leaving the town I submit a letter to the company’s president, suggesting three sure-fire events for next year’s installment of “Haunted Happenings.”

  Cat Pressing on the Common. This vivid historical demonstration gives Salem visitors a precise sense of the peine forte et dure suffered by Giles Corey on September 19, 1692. Participants will be drawn from the town’s stray cat population, plus losers of the Official Cat of Salem Contest who now wish to die.

  All Night Noose Dance. Special shoulder harnesses enable you to “swing with your partner” from the oaks atop Gallows Hill. Prizes in the following categories: Best Dressed Couple, Liveliest Kickers, Famous Last Words—plus the highly coveted Rebecca Nurse Endurance Trophy.

  Dorcas Good Memorial Leg-Irons Race. This event celebrates the feistiness of accused witch Dorcas Good, age four, who went irretrievably insane after lying in a freezing cell for eight months, loaded with leg irons and shackled to a wall. On Halloween morning, after bolting on their irons, participants will convene at the corner of Derby and Main, then jog competitively to Pickering Wharf.

  I further suggest to Atlantic Seaboard Enterprises that, having rehabilitated the Salem Witch Trials, they should consider doing the same with such thrilling historical dramas as the Albigensian Crusade, the massacre of the Huguenots, the bombing of Hiroshima, and Hitler’s Final Solution.

  “The Nazi concentration camps in particular hold tremendous untapped festivity potential,” I tell the company’s president. “Yes, there’s some sort of Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but it’s a stuffy and self-important place, utterly lacking the Seaboard Enterprises touch. The time isn’t right quite yet, but within a few generations people will doubtless be talking about ‘the great genocide hysteria, that unfortunate chapter in the saga of the twentieth century.’ Meanwhile, you can begin laying plans for ‘Holocaust Happenings at Nuremberg,’ including parades, contests, concerts, kids’ days, tours of the city’s great historic sites, and restaurants galore.” It will be especially important, I note, to offer the public a variety of tie-in merchandise. “Toward this end, I have contacted the Lionel Corporation about a special Auschwitz Electric Train Set, complete with a 4-8-4 steam locomotive and five box cars.” I haven’t

  yet received a reply, but if Atlantic Seaboard Enterprises deigns to

  write back, I suspect they will claim that my suggestions are

  offensive beyond redemption, outrageous

  beyond apology, and in

  atrociously

  bad

  j

  “Taste

  this,” Dunstan

  said, offering Jennet

  a lopsided and strange-smelling

  confection that vaguely resembled a loaf of

  bread. They were in the loft of the Walcott house, hurriedly

  dressing for bed ere October’s chill could seep into their bones. “Set the merest portion against your palate, and for a few amazing moments you’ll see pictures from the demon world—dancing phoukas, mayhap, or goblins with burning eyes.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “A witch-cake,” he said. “Abby baked it. Have a nibble.”

  Jennet broke off a piece of witch-cake and slid it into her mouth. She chewed. The morsel had a barbed and bitter flavor, but no phantoms appeared in her brain. “What ingredients?”

  “Molasses, honey, rye meal, and Abby’s urine,” he replied. “The recipe came from Mr. Parris’s Barbados slave. ’Tis an infallible way to prove a person’s been bewitched.”

  With an explosive movement of her lips and cheeks, Jennet spat out as many cake fragments as her tongue could summon. “How durst you feed me piss?!”

  “No phantoms?” Dunstan asked plaintively.

  “You addlepated pig!”

  Dunstan’s visage became so woeful as to evoke for Jennet the Sorrow-Faced Knight, Don Quixote. “I feared as much,” he said. “Abby can see ’em, but I cannot.”

  “’Tis evident she grows more frantic by the hour.”

  Her brother nodded in reluctant agreement. The witch-cake, he explained, owed its creation to the fact that of the fifteen suspects tried and convicted in September, only seven had gone to Gallows Hill. Two of the eight spared women were with child, and two had promised to name the others in their covens—but in the remaining four cases the acquittals reflected Judge Stoughton’s suspicion that the witnesses weren’t truly bewitched. Through confections of the sort Jennet had just sampled, Abby hoped to establish that she and her associates were full-blown victims of demonic influence.

  “She can bake a hundred witch-cakes, and she’ll ne’er regain her lost stature,” Jennet said.

  “The hunt is losing momentum,” Dunstan admitted, sighing expansively. “Father says Governor Phipps means to reprieve any and all persons convicted by the testimony of a Salem-Village daughter.”

  “He sounds a sensible man.”

  “Piffle! Had Abby not cried out Phipps’s wife, he would yet be the Court’s great champion.”

  “She cried out the Governor’s wife?” Jennet said, appalled.

  “Right to Judge Stoughton’s face.”

  “I’ll say this in your friend’s favor—she’s not wanting in spunk.”

  Two nights later, Walter sat his children down before Captain Walcott’s blazing hearth. Studying his countenance in the firelight, Jennet saw that the trials had taken a severe toll on the man. His features were shrunken and sallow, as if painted on the surface of a rotting gourd.

  “Governor Phipps was in Salem-Town today,” he said wearily. “We drank cider at Ingersoll’s. There be good news and bad. The good is that he hath recognized my office and will pay my salary as long as I ne’er consult with Miss Williams’s band, whom he calls ‘those damned mendacious minxes.’”

  Jennet could not restrain an un-Christian impulse to flash her brother a sardonic grin. He absorbed this disembodied blow, then fixed his eyes on the floor.

  “And the bad?” she asked.

  “The bad is that these great trials be now at an end,” Walter said, “for the Governor hath dissolved the Court.”

  “Dissolved it?” Dunstan wailed.

  “Aye.”

  “Dost mean we must now return to Haverhill?” the boy asked.

  “Indeed.”

  “But I fancy Salem-Village,” Dunstan protested.

  “You fancy Abigail Williams,” Jennet noted.

  “Our house is in Haverhill,” Walter said firmly.

  Dunstan winced, and despite a plethora of distressing matters—his willingness to think Isobel a heretic, his enthusiasm for Mr. Corey’s pressing, his offering of the witch-cake—Jennet felt a sudden sympathy for him. Even an apprentice pricker deserved some measure of affection in his cup, and Abby had evidently supplied him with a plenary portion.

  “I’faith, sir, Mr. Phipps doth sorely misjudge my friend,” Dunstan said. “Miss Williams can see the future in the waterborne white of an egg.”

  “In an egg?” moaned Walter, scowling.

  “And the angel Justine hath disclosed to her a great demon empire arising in this province. Mark me, Father, the real Massachusetts cleansing is yet to come.”

  “I don’t doubt it, son, and we shall keep our pricking needles sharp. But for the nonce we must plant our garden.”

  j

  JENNET WAS NOT A WEEK BACK in Haverhill when she realized that in her absence the citizens’ longstanding fear of a Nimacook attack had progressed to a contagion of terror. Not only had the apprehensive Colonists erected palisades and watch-towers along their northern border, they had organized a militia. The commanding officer, Nathaniel Saltonstall—the same Nathaniel Saltonstall who’d rounded out the judges’ panel at Salem (though the Rebecca Nurse affair had inspired him to resign in protest ere finishing his service)—lost no time convincing Walter and Dunstan to join his stalwart company, an obligation that had father and son marching acros
s the Common every Saturday morning, firearms propped against their shoulders, powder horns oscillating at their hips. Walter drilled with his deer-hunting musket. Dunstan’s weapon was an English fowling-piece he’d received from a wheelwright’s son in trade for his ink sketch of Goody Nurse’s hanging.

  The longer she pondered the matter, the more Jennet realized how perplexed she was by the Nimacooks’ hostility, and so she approached the sole scholarly mind in Haverhill, a Puritan divine named Malachi Foster.

  “Why do the Indians seek to destroy us?” she asked.

  The Reverend Foster replied in convoluted sentences, each more tangled than the most beleaguered line in her worst translation of Cicero, but eventually a lucid answer emerged. The Indians, it seemed, were wroth over the Colonists’ appropriation of their lands. When Jennet bade Mr. Foster elaborate, he solemnly described the stratagem whereby a Puritan settler would repeatedly send his livestock roving across a Nimacook planter’s maize hills, trampling the Indian’s crops and breaking his spirit, until he saw no alternative but to move farther west. An equally effective maneuver consisted in seizing an Indian’s acres as punishment for some infraction of Puritan law, such as drinking in public, dishonoring the Sabbath, or taking the Creator’s name in vain.

  Although the Nimacooks’ outrage made “a kind of logical sense,” Mr. Foster admitted, it enjoyed “no legal or moral standing.” As far back as 1619, Governor Winthrop had decreed that most of America fell under the rubric of vacuum domicilium: given that the various Algonquin and Iroquois tribes had not “subdued” but merely “occupied” their plantations, hunting parks, trapping grounds, and fishing streams, they had only a “natural” and not a “civil” claim to these domains. All such territory was in fact “waste” available for seizure. But the ultimate authority by which the Puritans encroached on the Nimacooks came from On High. In Mr. Foster’s view, Psalm 2:8 could not be more explicit. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.